


We Seek No Wider War

by shewho



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: A Lot of Handwaving Historical Accuracy, Alternatively Titled: 'Dear Dad 2.0', Basically Just A Series of Letters Dr. Erin Hunnicutt Writes to Her Parents From Vietnam, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical War Violence, Court Martial, Doc Erin, Epistolary, Lesbian Erin Hunnicutt, OT3 Parents Are Canon in This Fic, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Proper (ie: NON SEXUAL) use of the word 'Daddy', Rating May Change, Sunday Go-To-Court-Martial Clothes, Vietnam War, because I said so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-01-22 20:30:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21308177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: OVERSEAS MILITARY MAIL MUST HAVE APO OR FPO NUMBERS.(Letter follows at first opportunity. S.W.A.K. is non-regulation.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	1. March, 1974

_“Dear Dad,_

We made it to the processing center in Cam Rahn Bay, finally. You know I’ve never minded boats, but after three weeks on a transport ship, it wouldn’t’ve felt overdramatic to fall to my knees and kiss the blacktop when we finally disembarked. The only thing that stopped me, really, was the thought of having tar stains on my knees when I met the senior staff and of course that wouldn’t do.

There are only two other female doctors currently in this sector, and we speculate we’ll be split up soon. We’ve been told we’ll have to bunk with the nurses when we arrive at our placements – more’s the better, as far as I’m concerned. But the other doctors, they’re really lovely girls, Dad, and I’ll be sad to see them go. We got pretty close onboard the ship, as we had a four-man quarters to split amongst ourselves and very few ladies to bring into our fold.

Nobody seemed to know quite what to make of us, and we took to roaming the decks in a pack, chain-smoking a frankly obscene number of cigarettes (to be measured in _cartons,_ Daddy, not packs) and watching boys fresh from basic trip over their tongues trying to flirt with us. Really, the male of the species leaves so much to be desired. I fail to comprehend how you and Mommy and Hawk ended up in such a well-adjusted hunky-dory _Philadelphia Story_ marriage.

(But I doubt you will wish to read to rapt attention my musings on your marriage, so I shall continue!)

Barb Smithson graduated third in her class at Tulane. God help me, I’m almost glad I won’t have to work with her because that_ accent_ is... disarming and distracting, to say the least. She’s the tiniest little thing – think Mom’s general build, but stockier, with red hair and a thousand permanent freckles from the Louisiana sun. You can tell her nickname (Doc Barbie) is a diminutive, not a commentary on her appearance. Interestingly, our colleague, Angie Riemers looks more like a prototypical nurse-doll than any medical woman I’ve ever met: a live-and-in-Technicolor version of that willowy bone-china blonde who hovers bedside in the dreams of men <strike>and women</strike> everywhere.

As Bard would say, it’s busier than a beehive being attacked by a bear here. (It sounds better in that syrupy drawl, so use your imagination.) Everybody coming in, or going out to R&R and leaves in Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc has to pass through the placement center here, and to call it a madhouse would be putting it lightly.

The first stop today for me and the girls was a complete physical (including teeth cleaning). Next, on to gear issue, where we were provided with a lovely selection of tans, browns, and olive drab. I’m certain to look stunning, but we can’t all bring a husband home from the war, Daddy. The head nurse here – a real sweetheart, Madeline McCabe of Osceola who’s been leading us around like three lost pups on a choke chain – told us we’ll probably want to pick up a spare pair of fatigues, a second rain slicker, long underwear, another tan day-shirt, and – I quote directly here – just about as many socks as [we] can fit in [our] footlockers from the PX before we ship out. Talk about reassuring.

It seems that shower sandals you’ve got to provide for yourself, but everything else come standard issue: helmets, gasmasks, pistol belts, mattress covers, canteens (and cover straps), eating utensils, field bags, bug repellent, bucket hats, and even khaki underwear <strike>perish the thought</strike>.

It’s all a bit much to absorb at once, but I’m doing my damnedest. Tell Hawk I’ll call as soon as I know my placement, as I’m sure he’s got a package taped up and ready to be addressed. (Break it to him gently that his homemade wool socks should stay at home.) Tell Mommy it’s not so bad; everybody’s been decent so far and the weather’s a bit sticky but nothing I can’t handle.

Anxiously-but-excitedly, and as always with all my love,

_E_


	2. March, 1974

_“Dear Dad,_

Did I say “a bit sticky”? Understatement of the goddamn century.

As soon as we left the coastal areas, the temperature climbed fifteen degrees and the humidity went up forty percent. It’s like breathing over a freshly-cracked dishwasher, only it doesn’t smell like Trend or Thrill or Dawn. To even begin describing the smell seems a monumental task: hot vegetation and rotting plants, and metallic dirt and just the smell of so many people, all with this acrid overlay of something chemical.

I think my shirt’s stuck to my back semi-permanently, and I’d rather not consider that state of my pants. Needless to say, I’ll be cutting this pair down into shorts before tomorrow’s shifts begin.

We really are in a warzone now, Daddy. The biggest clue? Not the gunships that fly overhead in twos and threes as they head to the air bases near Nha Trang (these look oddly innocuous, with shark-grins and massive cartoon eyes painted on their front ends). Not the guns in the hands of every man on the transport truck that took me from the barracks to the buses leaving Cam Ranh for inland placements, or the chains of grenade pin-rings a few of them wear draped around their necks.

No, it’s the screens on the windows of our bus. The thick bars I might’ve overlooked as roll-bars, just something to maintain structural integrity. But the wire mesh was something I hadn’t expected.

There’s another doctor headed back to my MASH – my MASH, as if I have any claim on it other than being its newest resident – on the same bus, but his mood’s rather sour. It seems he’s just off a three-day jag in Tokyo with his fiancé who’s a nurse in Oahu, at Tripler. Is it a rule that doctors must marry nurses? <strike>Would that it could be in my case.</strike> I know you didn’t, but you’ve practically made a career of finding loopholes in those silly societal rules. Regardless, he was a bit put off by my chattiness – you know, that nervous ramble I start sometimes, where my mouth runs away from my brain? Thanks for that, Hawk – but warmed up when he realized I wasn’t, and I quote, “just another nurse”. (We may have a bigger problem if he’s this dismissive of the nursing staff at large, but I suppose I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.)

Anyways, he told me that the wire mesh is to keep the locals from throwing grenades and small homemade explosives into the bus. He called them ‘satchel charges’, which to me sounds like a fee you’d have to pay for carrying oversized bags on a streetcar, but perhaps that’s just me. The thought is terrifying, but in a filtered, intellectual way. We’ve been told countless times that road ambushes tend to paralyze traffic for hours, but that any American convoy still pushing through will gladly let medical personnel tag along.

Apologies in advance for the holes punched in this letter, Dad; I’m using my knees as a desk while we wind our way up the rutted roads further inland, and the ballpoint keeps stabbing through my paper.

With love, your slowly-melting daughter,

E


	3. May, 1974

_“Dear Dad,_

By the time this reaches you, I’ll have hopefully beaten my very first court martial. The charges? Conduct unbecoming of an officer, and some as-yet-undecided element of assault. Well, Dad... surely I am guilty in the most definitional terms, but I did what I did with good reason.

(Take a deep breath; I’m fine. And tell Hawkeye to quit reading over your shoulder – it’s rude.)

See – and Daddy, you know I can’t give too many details or this’ll arrive as nothing but a blacked out piece of paper signed “Love, Erin”; while I’m at it, big kisses to the censors! – the guys from <strike>[REDACTED]</strike> walked into... it wasn’t even a proper ambush, they just walked up on an NVA outpost and it all went to hell from there. 

By the time they got organized enough to call in air support, all the battalion aid people and a couple of our people had been drafted (I jest, somebody asked for medical staff to volunteer and most everybody did; don’t tell Hawk I used the D-word) to go in and deal with the wounded. Christ, we looked like a press ship coming down after the dirt had settled, that Chinook was so packed full of people and supplies. I’ve never seen more morphine in little individual styrettes. There must’ve been gallons of the stuff packed away in those tiny tubes, enough to get the entire Bay Area high as the stars.

But I digress...

We’d sort split off into teams of twos and threes and headed out from the landing zone wherever anybody pointed and shouted, “there’s wounded back that way!” I grouped up with this little S5 medic whose company had just been brought in to reinforce the guys along the <strike>[REDACTED]</strike> perimeter, kid named Betzhold. Swear to god, he had the thickest southern accent I’ve ever heard, all drawl and _“ma’am” _this,_ “ma’am” _that, _“ma’am, this man’s bleedin’ out all o’er me, gimme a hand would ya please?”._

So there we are, on the ground, working on this group of about thirty, thirty-five guys all clustered together in a little dip in the hardpack. Betzhold’s going around the group to the left, I was going to the right, and I was trying to calm down a private who hadn’t even been hit by any rounds but had apparently wandered into a literal, actual hornet’s nest and was stung up pretty fierce from his helmet on down to his waist when Betzhold comes jogging over, telling me in this low whisper that he’s found their squad leader, a sergeant who’s got bandages on his leg and stomach, but isn’t exhibiting the appropriate amount of pain or visible distress.

“Is he just in shock?” I asked, still trying to assess the shape of the stung-up kid.

“Alert and talking,” he replied, his mouth drawn down in this sharp little line, so tight it looked like somebody’d stitched it shut. “I don’t think he’s actually _hurt_ at all, Captain.”

“Alright,” I said and we left the private in the care of a hulking corporal with a round through his forearm, whom I’d already packed and wrapped.

So we get there, and the sergeant’s lying propped up against a scrub tree, fatigue shirt open, t-shirt rucked up under his armpits, and the left leg of his trousers sliced open to the knee. His stomach and leg are both all swaddled in bandages, but there isn’t any blood on the t-shirt, so I’m thinking right from the get that maybe Betzhold’s suspicions are valid.

I mean, really. You ever see anything soak up blood faster than an army-issue t-shirt?

So I go over, start to do my thing. “I’m Captain Hunnicutt,” I said, crouching near his leg which he jerked away from me as I moved to probe it. “My medic here couldn’t give me a clear report; just how bad were you hit?” I asked him, noting that he hadn’t so much as grimaced when he’d moved the bandaged appendage.

“Oh, not so bad, ma’am,” he said. There’s no slurring, no clenched teeth; his forehead wasn’t even puckered. “I think it’s just a flesh wound. I’ll be alright.”

“How about I take a look at it right here?”

“No, no, I’d really rather you didn’t mess with it. I’ve got it wrapped pretty good.”

That was really what convinced me. Nobody but another medic ever says _“no”_ when a doctor offers to take a look. The army’s full of morons, but nobody’s that stupid.

I tore that bandage off his leg (he didn’t have it wrapped nearly as well as he thought he did, amateur) and there was nothing. Not a scratch, not even a bug bite! He was hollering at me, but I pulled the bandaging around his stomach down and again – nothing!

Well, Daddy, I’m not proud of it, exactly, but in the moment there was nothing else to do but drag him up by the collar of his decidedly non-bloody t-shirt and just whale on him. He must’ve had an inch or two and maybe fifty pounds on me, but I was so fucking _angry_... I mean, I kinda beat the shit out of him, Dad. I was yelling, Betzhold was shouting, the sergeant was hollering, and when his nose was broken and he was spitting blood at us, I ripped the stripes off his shirtsleeves and stuck them in my pocket.

“You ever hear of a field promotion?” I snapped, shoving him back to the ground where we’d found him. “Consider this a field _demotion_.”

I was steamed but Betzhold was chuckling as he went back to treating everybody who could be helped with the supplies we’d managed to drag from the clearing. He knew I didn’t really have any authority to demote the guy, but _damn_ we’d both felt good when that shock and guilt rolled over his now-bloody face. I went and found the radio operator (who was dehydrated and sunburnt but otherwise okay), told him to get in touch with the command helicopter that’d been cruising overhead all day and tell them that not only was Sergeant Landers not wounded, he was also no longer a sergeant.

As you can see, my actions weren’t anything _sparkling_, but his were worse. I didn’t even think in the moment about his neglect of duties; I was more upset about the fraud and waste of medical supplies. I believe his conduct was overall far more unbecoming than mine, but I suppose others’ opinions may differ.

Put in a good word with whichever minor war god deals in courts martial, and don’t tell Mommy.

Hopefully my next letter to you will be posted from this same little spot on the map, and not from prison.

Your (righteously pissed off) daughter,

_E_

**Author's Note:**

> _The Philadelphia Story_ (1940) is a movie in which Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) has two fiancés and two weddings, and is a subtle period-appropriate nod to throuples before throuples were cool. Beej, Peggy, and their cinephile husband (HAWKEYE) would 1000% approve of their child’s use of reference. #proudparents.
> 
> “APO” stands for Army or Air Force Post Offices; “FPO” represents Fleet Post Offices, serving the Navy, Marine Corps, & Coast Guard. The use of a number assigned to an APO/FPO as an address provided flexibility and security if/when military units changed location.


End file.
